Watch your language

Why is it that The Bee undercuts California's prospects for high-speed rail by referring to it as the "bullet train"? I refer to both the recent front page story about the governor's budget and Lew Griswold's South Valley column .

Conventional passenger rail created the Valley as a viable economic region more than 100 years ago by simply making it accessible to the world. With passenger airlines having to forever abandon commercial routes between the Valley and the rest of the state, high-speed rail offers a chance to reconnect the Valley and once again provide fast, reliable access and therefore investment, jobs, prosperity and well-being. Why run it down?

This glib characterization appears regularly on both The Bee's news and editorial pages and it is a negative endorsement of high-speed rail. No one associated with transportation professionally or publicly ever uses the term "bullet" to refer to high-speed rail.

From witnessing drive-by shootings to school slayings, TV entertainment and network news, the public has never been so terrorized by a gun-crazed, bullet-ridden era. So why must The Bee associate the most valuable and important project to the San Joaquin Valley in more than a century with bullets and violence?

Larry Miller

Fresno

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